What I Thought Love Required: It Cost Me. Choose Now.

Before we ever fall in love with another person, we quietly learn what love is supposed to look like.Most of us never realize we're carrying those lessons.What I Thought Love Required is a deeply personal memoir about the invisible beliefs we absorb before we are old enough to challenge them.Be useful.Be agreeable.Need less.Carry more.Hold it together.Many of us build entire lives around these instructions and call it love.Moving through childhood, marriage, heartbreak, parenthood, ambition, and burnout, Jesse traces what happens when the roles that once kept her safe begin to keep her small. This is not a book about dramatic betrayals or obvious villains. It is about the quieter truth: how women learn to over-function, over-give, and slowly disappear inside their own lives while the world applauds their strength.Honest, compassionate, and deeply reflective, What I Thought Love Required invites readers to question the stories they have carried for far too long and imagine a different way forward.This isn't a book about finding love.It's about remembering you were never meant to earn it."For anyone who has ever had to shrink themselves to be chosen." Luwi Nyakansaila, Readers' FavoriteBook One of the What I Thought Series.